


Songs, Sonnets (Look What You’ve Done To Me)

by chaos_and_havoc_live_rent_free_here



Category: Hannibal (TV)
Genre: (probably), (which is not something to sneeze at), Angst, Boating Inaccuracies (Very Likely), But Somehow Less Of A Mess Than Hannibal, But That Depends On Your Definition Of Happy, Childhood Memories, Compromise, Cooking, Crying, Dreams, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Eventual Happy Ending, Falling In Love, First Kiss, Fix-It of Sorts, Hannibal Is Pushed To His Emotional Breaking Point, Hannibal Lecter Loves Will Graham, Hannibal Lecter is a Mess, Injury Recovery, Internal Conflict, Internal Monologue, Introspection, Less Cannibalism Than You’d Think, Lovesickness, M/M, Major Character Injury, Making Up, Medical Inaccuracies, Mentioned Mischa Lecter, Mythology References, Other Additional Tags to Be Added, POV Alternating, POV Hannibal Lecter, POV Third Person, POV Will Graham, Post-Fall (Hannibal), Repressed Memories, Second Kiss, Slow Burn, Someone Help Hannibal Lecter For Once, Tags Are Hard, Tags Contain Spoilers, Tags May Change, They Have ALL The Unresolved Tension, Trauma, Unresolved Tension, Will Graham Loves Hannibal Lecter, Will Graham and Hannibal Lecter in Cuba, Will Graham is a Mess, may be slightly ooc in places bc I’M TRYING MY BEST and emotions are hard, no beta we die like men
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-02-07
Updated: 2021-03-06
Packaged: 2021-03-12 05:48:30
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 5
Words: 10,792
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29255478
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/chaos_and_havoc_live_rent_free_here/pseuds/chaos_and_havoc_live_rent_free_here
Summary: The cliff is highThe water deepAnd when we lay our souls to sleepFly them as flags at half mastWe are alive but we have passed—“...He looks like he is going to unravel at the seams, unclean and unkept and so very pale, but in the dappled light of morning Will could be Galatea’s brother. It brings warmth to his skin and livens him in a way impossible to capture in the moment, in pencil or otherwise, in the likeness of ivory or marble. It makes the brown of his hair glow, highlights of faint gold, or was that the glare, was that the blur of sleep in Hannibal’s eyes?...”Or, in admittedly less poetic terms, a Post-Fall fic in which Hannibal still can’t just say things and Will becomes increasingly exasperated and confused. Typical shenanigans.Updates on Saturday, subject to occasional changes.(Time Jump = ———————)
Relationships: Will Graham/Hannibal Lecter
Comments: 4
Kudos: 30





	1. Galatea

_ The sky is a curious thing. It may be a flat slate grey for the entirety of the day, the light soft and washed out and it seems more calming than miserable. There are still contours in the clouds, they still churn and twist and roll over on themselves, forever sleeping but never soundly. _

_ Today should be perfect.  _

_ Will fixes his gaze on a point where the sky meets the sea, focusing his efforts on distinguishing the exquisite grey-blue of the riotous, spiteful ocean with the sharp slate of sky it meets like water and the edge of a frosted glass bowl. Only they blend together sometimes. Distance blurs things. They become distorted. _

_ “The bluff is eroding,” Hannibal says, observing a point somewhere near Will’s chosen spot on the horizon, “There was more land when I was here with Abigail. More land still when I was here with Miriam Lass.” _

_ “Now you’re here with me.” _

_ “And the bluff is still eroding. You and I are suspended over the roiling Atlantic. Soon all of this will be lost to the sea.” Hannibal is right. Will takes a glance at the carved-out portion of rock below him. A handful of pebbles drops toward the yawning maw of the ocean, scooped out of the coastline in a perfect crescent, a Cheshire grin. Uneven, filthy teeth push painfully up through rippling gums and sit poised and ready to bite, to crunch and close tight around some unwitting victim leaning too far over the edge, forcing the ground to give way under them. A tongue current will push them around, play with them, break them down and wrap them in the suffocating hold of the tide, spearing them on the molars for later. _

_ Not unlike a shrike. _

_ ——————— _

It shines like an eye, like the blessed, alluring light hanging just above the gaping, hellish maw of some monstrous anglerfish just above the water’s choppy surface. How long it had been before this—Will is a mite hazy on the details—he and Hannibal had stood looking over the bluff, down into a greedy, yawning mouth. Rocky teeth, a current tongue. And they had plunged into it.

Someone had pushed them over the edge, trailing loose dirt and stones. Someone had angled them into the water so as to avoid gnashing, uneven teeth. And someone had fallen unconscious and the other had dragged them each to the surface, keeping not only the pair afloat but common sense, recollections of conversations held hours ago, of safeguards and last-minute preparations if worst came to worst. Who had it been? Who had acted in crucial moments?

And now Will’s adrenaline is dwindling. How long has he been swimming, bobbing in the brutal ocean and keeping an unconscious Hannibal’s head barely above water? Surely not as long as it has felt. And then the dirty light of that dingy little boat comes into view. A relief, a hope they’d called on. A shape, a propeller and the surface of the sea. A bipedal figure stands stooped above the waves, obscured only by the contours of the ocean.

She reaches out for him.

Will’s lungs are salty and his throat is raw from coughing and ocean water and blood. He swipes at the hand extended to him before his head breaches the surface.

Chiyoh pulls at his wrist, Will’s hand locked firmly around her own. She’s lifting the weight of two: Will’s other arm is curled just as securely around Hannibal. It is the first true pain Will has felt since the fall, the first thing he’s aware of since adrenaline had switched off everything but the essentials and his bleeding shoulder was deemed unnecessary. He coughs and splutters and howls as he hoists Hannibal’s body onto the tiny deck at Chiyoh’s feet, pulling himself up with his uninjured arm.

Somehow he has enough energy to stand. It will be an image she will remember for the rest of her life. Will is silhouetted against the moon, soaked from head to foot in blood and seawater. His bleeding arm hangs by his side. But however fearful his shaking frame must be, his face draws all eyes. Even Hannibal, unconscious, unable to whiteness the terrible spectacle, seems to turn his head to one side just so, just enough to be caught in the moonlight.

Will isn’t bleeding very actively but there are still bloodstains everywhere. He looks crazed. He looks as though he could—would, maybe—reach up, out, and by force of will alone pull the cliff he’s just fallen from into the sea. Force the ocean to devour its companion, to sate its everlasting hunger. To silence it’s grumbling and wining and crying by force. His eyes are wild and wide and so very uncharacteristic of him. This man is not a wolf in lamb’s clothes. He is a god in a man’s skin. A god-player. He hasn’t quite grown into it yet, being free of such a suffocating mold. But Chiyoh, knowing Hannibal as well as she does, concludes in that moment that Will will fit it well.

For now, he is human. The moment breaks.

She catches the man as he falls to his knees. 

———————

The sun has already peaked over the horizon when Hannibal wakes, when he aches, alone. The lively colors of the sunrise bleed through the window, into the tiny cabin, into the even tinier room. They filter through everything, seeping into the walls, the floorboards, the sheets of the bed that dwarfs the room itself. Through sleepy eyes, through a tiny window, through trees darkened and silhouetted, Hannibal watches the sunrise.

He recalls, as though from a previous life, enjoying the morning, the quiet time before thought as dawn cleared a path for the sun. A time of peace with no need for rhyme or reason, no fear, no sorrow.  _ As though from a previous life.  _ How distant does his office feel now, his sketches and the balance of a scalpel and a pencil? 

The morning’s peace is broken by the creak of untouched hinges and for a moment Hannibal’s head twitches in the direction of the door. Chiyoh passes through his field of vision, the sun filtering in around her. She bears armfuls of bandages, gently laying them out on a nightstand too small for the load. Hannibal examines the tools with something resembling fondness, talking, in a hushed voice, through the redressing of his bandages.

He helps to loosens his own bandages, watching as Chiyoh pulls them off in their entirety. The red looks bloodier than it should in the light, however minimal the stain is. How much had he bled? She cleans the wound with as much care as she can, and while Hannibal grits his teeth he recalls something from the night before. Needles and string, stitching closed stab wounds. How precise he had been. Only with Will would he liken it to restoration.

Chiyoh leans back, waiting for the area to dry before redressing it. Only now does she look at him, a calculated question hanging in the air. She knows him too well, perhaps more than she should. Watching, having his back when he himself wasn’t quite enough, and oh, that look is almost patronizing, as though scolding him for scraping his knee during recess. 

“Where is Will?” Hannibal’s voice is just above a rasp.

Chiyoh’s face changes ever so slightly, and maybe there was the ghost of a smile there, something bitter, something wishing the best of luck to him. She takes up the bandages and begin to redress the wound. 

———————

The time of thought arrives with the sunrise, a rude awakening Hannibal cannot alter, cannot reform like he so usually does. His thoughts flick by like still from early films, fuzzy, grainy and still so immersive: once, an open seascape with the moon tossed high above it, twice, a body slipping between states of consciousness, (was it his, or someone else’s?) thrice, a needle and thread weaving through skin and blood.

He cannot help but think, now that he is alone. The fresh bandages are just about as welcome as the sunrise, but neither will quell the tension, the foreboding, boding ill. He knows not what his future holds, but somehow the knowledge of a handful of probable outcomes, likely scenarios not guaranteed is...frightening, perhaps? It will be delayed however, by the creak of neglected hinges. Chiyoh again enters the room, holding the door open.

And Will is there, he is breathing, alive. 

Chiyoh takes a seat at the edge of the bed, more weary than he’s seen her a long time. She looks out of place in such casual clothes, something no doubt taken from a closet somewhere here. She keeps an eye trained on Will as he moves, unsteady on his feet and frail.

He looks like he is going to unravel at the seams, unclean and unkept and so very pale, but in the dappled light of morning Will could be Galatea’s brother. It brings warmth to his skin and livens him in a way impossible to capture in the moment, in pencil or otherwise, in the likeness of ivory or marble. It makes the brown of his hair glow, highlights of faint gold, or was that the glare, was that the blur of sleep in Hannibal’s eyes?

Hannibal thinks that he could sit here forever, wound open until the end of time, bedridden for the rest of eternity if he could only hold Will there. But. The man’s presence, his thoughts (so loud, so vivid in detail) were what drew Hannibal too him, but they were so troublesome, weren’t they? Hannibal would seemingly forever be confounded by this man, by the whirling, shredding vortex of disorder he left in his wake, of the mess Will Graham left him in.

  
The tangled strands of an unfinished tapestry, the knots he found once he returned to it after his rest, once organized in neatly arranged strands when he’d left them. And when Hannibal went to work on it next he would spend his time deconstructing each knot and puzzle left for him there, furious and enthralled, and they would start the cycle anew. How could Will do this without knowing, disarming him without conscious thought?

What could cause such strong confusion, what could it portend, the racing of the heart, a mild anxiety, a fascination beyond words.

What was it that Hannibal felt?

A destructive thing, chaotic. Pan’s scream from deep in the forest. And all of this locked up in the wondrous mind of the fragile, beautiful man lying next to him, propped up on the headboard, staring at the wall opposite, the sun warming his face from a distance. There would never be a way to capture that, not in scripture or in art or by the hands of Michelangelo, even with his skill and care as he crafted David. No way to capture all of that in a moment. 

Hannibal watches Will like he does the sunrise that warms his tired face and he is all too aware that Chiyoh knows. He can practically hear her brain ticking away, a critical eye, sizing Will up, keeping a watchful eye on Hannibal. She knows, she somehow knows more of Will that he does, she has fragments of his puzzle that Hannibal has been searching for. Not all of them, but a handful.

He wants nothing more than to complete it. Such is the curse of those a slave to detail. For now, however, in this moment before he must look away, Hannibal will quietly admire Will in all his fragmented, fascinating glory as the morning sun glances off his skin like the sunlight does the moon.


	2. Primavera

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Time Skip: about a day or so

Chiyoh drops the keys of the boat into Will’s open palm and presses his fingers closed around it, and he can’t help but feel as though it’s some sort of parting gift. She looks at him, and somehow she confirms what he suspects. It feels like a christening. She turns to go. Will wonders where she’s off to. He has a vague idea of where they are and how they can evade the FBI, but how will she fly under their radar? Where will she run to?

“Thank you.”

She turns towards him momentarily on the hill she’s begun to climb, and she looks at Will and smiles in a curious sort of way. When she turns her back again she does not look back. As the soft crunch of leaves fades into obscurity, Will examines the keys in his hand, squeezing the metal and pressing into his palm. The bite of the teeth threatens to break skin. He feels very much alive.

Will’s hand finds his cheek, ghosting over the thick gauze. He presses harder than he should on the bandages along the side of his face. He is very much alive. Each breath since water last filled his lungs and left its scars there is a reminder to Will of—of what? A life lost? A life earned? A gift. But that implies something he wanted, _wants_.

A chance, then. Everything is up in the air.

Will wonders if the chance was a choice as he stares blankly at the evening horizon through the trees. He feels very small in a very, very vast environment. He stares at the boat on the shore, docked at something that would be best described as a plank of wood, a vessel just large enough for two. He can’t see past where the horizon touches the sky, where they bleed together, where they become indistinguishable from one another and join. Maybe if he could, he would see every outcome, every possible variable. Maybe he could find one that was satisfactory.

———————

Will wakes early the next morning, earlier than the sun, and he thinks about the price he payed. He thinks about the moment Hannibal’s foot touched the gas pedal and he thinks about the fallout, the order of events, dominoes with images carved into them like tarot cards spelling out their timeline.

A handful of people will know what happened almost instantly upon hearing the news. Bedelia, Alana and Margot. They will catch on quickly. Bedelia will be the first to come to that conclusion, knowing Hannibal as she does that the man leaves no promise unfulfilled. Alana and Margot will deliberate, weight their options, and put trust in no one but themselves. And they will make their moves soon after.

Alana and Margot will be watching their backs, but Bedelia may not do anything. She knows Hannibal all too well to think running will do her any good. But Alana and Margot have a child, a son. Time will tell.

Jack and Price and Zeller will crumble in their confusion and their grief, but Jack most of all in his failure. A voice in Will’s head sticks up for Jack though, and he considers that Jack had no way of knowing what he was getting into. The puppy playing bear cub and the wolf it stripped of its domesticity. Perhaps he was taught to hunt. Or he was just applying a skill set to a different scenario.

Molly and Walter will grieve. Molly will think the best of him and Will finds himself wishing the best for her and Walter. They will not meet again. And this is the way the dominos fall. Will wonders if his dogs will miss him. He misses his dogs. He misses noses and round, begging eyes and unconditional love and silence that bridges the gap.

Will keeps his eyes close just a few moments more, noticing a piece that hasn’t yet tipped over. He waits, refusing to wake, refusing to look.Not until he—after a few more moment of careful thought—concludes that his hand is lighter than it typically is. Something isn’t missing, just out of place. But was it a necessary part? The loss of his ring feels like death, as though Will Graham’s corpse, weighed down by a previous life sits cold and empty in a watery grave. He sleeps soundly at last. The ring is heavy, the absence disconcerting. 

Avoiding his injured shoulder, Will does his best to roll out of bed without disturbing the delicate morning silence, nearly failing twice because he overbalanced and almost fell out of bed and caught the door before the hinges creaked again. He should change the bandages on his shoulder. He really should.

But hunger nags at him and instead of heading towards the ness of medical supplies strewn around the tiny living room, Will, in a few paces, makes it to the combined kitchen and dining room. He remembers snapshots of the setting, bits a pieces of this room from that long, long night. Will opens the rather skinny fridge and pulls out a carton of eggs, closing the door as quietly as he can. He searches for a few fruitless minutes before finding a pan and setting to work. 

Will hopes he won’t wake Hannibal, but with two plates of scrambled eggs in hand, he can’t control the door to the tiny bedroom very well. The creak cracks through the morning silence. He can see Hannibal start in his sleep and his eyes pop open, shutting again and fluttering, fighting stay awake. When Hannibal can finally keep his eyes open long enough to survey his surroundings, he looks at Will.

This is the second time he’s done this; Will won’t tell a soul, but he could feel Hannibal watching him with a very particular kind of look the morning before. Peculiar. It was reverent, awe-struck almost, like viewing the temple of some long-lost deity preserved in the side of a mountain, weathered by the years and still standing in all of it’s glory.

Will breaks eye contact with him, instead turning towards the window for a moment with feigned curiosity at the state of the sunrise. The eggs will get cold soon. He takes a stride and a half towards the chair wedged between the window and the bedside table, setting both plates down with the soft clunk of wood and ceramics, still aware of Hannibal’s eye following his every move with insatiable curiosity.

Will drops the forks with a bit less care, and the clatter seems to shake Hannibal from his reverie. His eyes unfocus and refocus again, instead settling somewhere off in the middle-distance. Steam coils upwards from the plates of eggs. They wait. Will realizes that it might have been a better idea to fetch Hannibal a glass of water. He’s surely parched. The silence presses twice as hard as before. Hannibal seems to know this, and reaches weakly to stay Will’s had as it twitches. The morning’s quiet is broken.

Will reaches for his fork and plate, shifting begrudgingly in his chair so as not to aggravate his left arm. Hannibal closes his eyes in the quiet, and nervousness begins to tie a knot in Will’s stomach. He hasn’t cooked for Hannibal before.  _ He hasn’t cooked for Hannibal before.  _ They’ve just barely survived the ordeal of a lifetime and they can only currently focus on lying low and keeping out of sight of the FBI, who’ve surely put out warrants with bounties on their heads.

And Will is wondering if Hannibal will eat the eggs he’s made.

Perhaps Hannibal is rubbing off on him, with all of his reverence and curiosity. He wonders if he prefers observation to interaction, still he walks the line. Would it do well to add a variable to the experiment? Will sets his fork down—lightly this time—and, in two trips, brings the plates and forks over the the other side of the bed, clearing a space for himself and his cargo on the duvet.

With much wincing and adjusting an hisses of pain, Hannibal is siting relatively upright. He looks wrong like this. He looks fragile, more like fragments of gold leaf than a carving of jade, smooth and cold and tough, every bit as elegant. Lethal. But he crumbles. He’s still just as radiant but he is fragile in a way Will has never seen him. Dependent.

Hannibal turns his head towards the still-warm plates of eggs and opens his eyes. He wastes no time, choosing a fork with a strangely steady hand and pulling a plate towards him. Will takes it as a cue. They eat in relative silence, the wash of the ocean and the early birds and the rustle and constant motion of the forest the only things to disturb them.

Metal and ceramics scrape.  The knot tightening in the pit of Will’s stomach dissipates somewhat as he digs into his eggs, keeping an ear on Hannibal and an eye on him through his peripheral. It hurts to open his mouth but hunger overrides pain.

Somehow, the eggs are better than they ever were. They’re buttery and fluffy, like he used to make for Walter. He’d practically inhale them and Molly would laugh, and the dogs would skip around their feet, curious and excitable at the energy in the room.

Used to, Will thinks. _As though in some past life._

Will hears a short exhale from somewhere near him and is pulled from his thoughts. He looks over to see Hannibal, framed in the sunlight streaming through an open window, so very tired, unnaturally fragile, but just barely looking towards Will with smile reminiscent of the one they exchanged in the Uffizi Gallery.

He was not an old man then, Will decided, he was far from old. Far from withered, wither ing. He looks like he might be now, however temporary this is . But the smile, however slight, held a certain regret back then, a wishfulness, a terrible liking for poisoned honey.

There is something missing now, a little less regret, but the wishes and destructive pallet are still there. Will knows well that his tastes have been forcibly alerted so that the poison becomes sweet, he has developed a dependency, and so has Hannibal. Might they alter their tastes again? For now, nothing will be said, but Will wonders if he looks at Hannibal in the same way he looks at Will.

With reverence and guilt.


	3. Anasi

“One layer at a time, slowly.”

Hannibal has moved to the living room, now a mess of medical supplies, books, and other things Will has found in his attempts to practically turn the house upside down. There isn’t much to find. Hannibal wonders if Will may be intentionally doing this, perhaps as an act of malice or out of a simple desire to avoid him. They have not yet spoken of that night.

Hannibal, between bouts of sleep and frustratingly underwhelming meals (no fault of Will’s of course, he simply wants to get back into his usual rhythm and Hannibal is too smart to be doing that just yet), often wonders if they perished there somehow. They will talk about it eventually, but Hannibal has no gauge for what eventually looks like, how far away it is. He has no idea what that conversation will be.

Will Graham is more of an enigma to him now that he has ever been, a variable, and itch in his brain he can’t scratch. But Hannibal’s luck as a hunter in this case seems rotten, and Will has evaded him since they began working together, always vanishing through the trees, always stalk-still, never noticed until he moved, never caught as he ran.

Hannibal has gotten close on a handful of occasions, often wondering if he is chasing a deer or a fish. He watched Will learn, endearing and infinitely frustrating. He’s visible through the trees and Hannibal knows him now, is able to pick him out by the shape of his antlers and the pattern of his coat because he’s watched him for so long but he just _can’t catch him_. He can’t figure him out. There is no solving this man, there is no box with a picture or description, there is no evidence of puzzle pieces.

But he knows they exist, and Hannibal is fully and uncomfortably aware of the fact that they will fall into place in their own time and they will need to resolve this particular arc in their story. He wants desperately to know how things will end. He sees so much about so very many people and how their threads will be cut or if they are lucky and keep their wits about them, how their arcs with him will end, but Will is, again, an enigma, a puzzle, an impossible prize made even more unwieldy by his confidence. Hannibal sees it in how he walks and talks, each fine motor movement, how he  breathes. 

——•——

_ “You did not see him then. I can imagine you would have liked to.” _

_ Chiyoh leans her head back against the seat of the chair, stoic and almost vacant in her contemplation of the ceiling and the events of the night Hannibal had missed in his unconsciousness. Hannibal can see only half of her, one eye obscured by his stack of pillows as he turns his head to view her. She reminisces. He watches the recollections flick past her mind’s eye as if projected through her eyes on to the ceiling like a film, the reels of thin and fragile paper switched seamlessly in and out, the captions clear as day. He cannot see what she sees, but her tone betrays a certain reverence, a shock, perhaps.  _

_ “What did he look like?” Hannibal rasps, swallowing dryly. _

_ Chiyoh turns to him, considering her words for a moment, and again Hannibal can see the film replaying again and again in her mind. He watches the projector shut off, he sees the light die.  _

_ “He looks like he will grow into the skin you have crafted for him. He will wear it well.” _

——•——

Trapped for what was forever to him in a stuffy glass cell, Hannibal knows he’s deteriorated. He’s antsy, overly energetic, a sled dog kept for weeks inside without training. He needs to run, to breathe. He needs to see again. And in the time he was kept practically underground, Will has grown. He’s changed, and Hannibal suspects he no longer knows Will as well as he thinks he does.

He watches as Will peels back the bandages, layer by layer, strip by strip, and the knitting of his brow and the unconscious confidence in his movements are enough to to tell him he is right. His eyes are sharper and the hunter’s confidence, the poise and the quiet hum of energy have replaced the constant buzz of anxiety, the mistrust, and the cornered rabbit. The stag hunts now, and ground-nesting birds beware.

“Into the bag, we don’t want them contaminating anything.” Hannibal mutters. With a flourish, Will folds the rest of the bandages up, drops them unceremoniously into a trash bag, and deposits the latex gloves in with them. He sits back on his heels, stretching his back and shoulder. Hannibal examined it earlier in the day, it was healing nicely.

He feels a pang of jealousy as Will flexes his shoulder gently, wandering off to wash his hands again before redressing Hannibal’s wounds. There is so much he wants to do. He wants to move, _needs to move._ But the pain catches up to him through painkillers and Hannibal relaxes back into the couch cushions, waiting. Back with clean hands and a new pair of gloves, Hannibal begins to talk Will through the cleaning process again, then adjusting his position so as to allow Will better access to redress his wound. Silence falls again. 

“You’re unsettled.” Will isn’t questioning him.

“Yes.” Hannibal can feel the prompt in the air. “Do you intend to pick my brains now that you have the chance?”

“I dislike sitting in silence with you.”

“It brings you back to our becoming.”

“This isn’t a therapy session.”

“My apologies. The tape is next to the glove box.”

Will hold the bandages in place, tearing off a substantial piece of medical tape in lieu of conversation and he seems to end it there. 

“What was it like growing up with Chiyoh?” Never mind, then.

Hannibal pauses before answering, deep in thought of forests and burning spices, children’s footfalls and echoing, empty halls. How young had they been then? How much does he remember? How much can he say? Should he say? The quiet is very loud for a handful of moments.  


“It was often a distant experience. She was my aunt’s handmaiden, and thus had her duties to fulfill. I was already a young man. But when she was relinquished from her tasks, she would find me...”

Will tapes down the bandages, listening to Hannibal speak. He comes to the realization that he’s never heard Hannibal talk for this long uninterrupted before, and as he organizes their medical supplies blindly, his progress dwindling with every word that leaves Hannibal’s lips, he realizes that he has heard _so little_ about Hannibal  from Hannibal  at all. Only ever from others, but never from the man himself.

And so, indulging his curiosity for a little bit, Will listens. He listens as Hannibal, quiet and reserved in his details begins to lean into the story itself, becoming increasingly verbose as time wears on.

And Will sits. And he listens.

_ He can see in his mind’s eye, clear as his crime scene recollections, the halls of a castle that is described to him, the arch of every ceiling, the creak of every floorboard. Patterns on wallpaper and the watchful eyes of portraits. He can see Hannibal’s words as they construct the picture themselves, as he describes each and every scene in detail. _

_ Barely yet a man, he stands picturesque against a bookshelf, a book split open in his hands as he skims across paragraphs of minuscule Italian print, reading aloud to Chiyoh, sitting at a window seat nearby and contemplating the glass as he speaks. Will can hear Hannibal’s Italian like a record playing somewhere in the passages of his mind, faint, but audible. It’s smooth, almost musical in tone and timbre, but the slight roll of an r or another hard consonant would disrupt the flow of foreign language, evening out again before breaking and mending. _

_ Will listens far longer than he intends to, watching as time slips by and the days become brighter, and in the kitchen, out in the greenhouse, in the grounds, in the forests two figures are simultaneously silhouetted and thrown into relief by a flickering flame, and Will can smell the herbs and smoke and sharp, tangy spices. _

_ Mint and rosemary, then chives, parsley, thyme and sage; they take up the greenhouse and kitchen. Lavender and chamomile and valerian roots and flowers make up the forest and grounds. Earthy scents and wildflowers, cooking spices and ground herbs. _

Will leans against the legs of the only other bit of furniture near him, watching a scene of Hannibal’s endless words fed through a mental projector.

_ He listens to to the clack of mancala beads in the carved wooden bowls of the game board, distinguishing from the soft clicking of go pieces. A young man and a girl verging on womanhood stare at the pieces of a chess board, one tracing the carvings of his queen piece while waiting for his opponent to make her move. Perhaps he doesn’t yet realize it, but his fingers drum quietly as he thinks. _

_The clicking of the delicate cogs and wheels in his brain is almost audible and a clear enough rhythm is discernible if Will closes his eyes and strains his ears to listen._

_At another vague point in time, the two sit hunched over mahjong tiles, studying their setup with infinite focus. In some way, the silence is broken. The girl perks up, listening, then rushes from the room, uttering her silent apologies. The young man looks after a fragment of fabric as it vanishes out of sight. His disappointment is palpable. Will can hear the girl’s footsteps recede as she vanishes into the house._

Into the house, away from this house, away from the cramped sofa in this tiny room, a mess of medical supplies and stories, away from this tiny cabin nestled in the cradle of a hill and an out-of-sight dock that is just as small. An isolated environment, self-sustaining, unstable, mending. The sun peaks in the sky through a skylight and casts a dappled square of light, sweeping across the wooden floor, across books, bandages, and spots of blood.

It does not touch the insides of Will’s mind, but he can project them outwards. He can create his own sun, a disk of brightness and heat. He can light it like an oil lamp, hang it hight on the topmost branches of trees, even higher, hang it on a strand of the firmament’s tapestry that that bridges the gap between the mountains that hold up the sky.

That sun filters through the skylight mirrors the one that casts shadows in the corners of Castle Lecter, and Will can follow the footfalls of figures surely immortalized in the nighttime sky. He follows their games without playing.

And eventually, after a long, long while of talking (no, not talking, storytelling) Hannibal closes his eyes, cat-like in his enjoyment of that square of sun stretched across his torso. Will looks upwards at the glass panel in the roof. Time has indeed passed. He looks back at the man on the couch, a believer in god but you would be mistaken to take him for one who is god-fearing. God fears him, for if he cannot instill fear into his subjects and they care not for his offerings, what is he to do?

Will wonders, watched by a contented, observant Hannibal. He no longer fears him. It is a statement, followed, as it will always be, by a question. If he lives not in fear of such a man, reclining like a lion does on a rocky perch, lazily surveying all that he sees in the warm sunlight, than what is this man to him?

He cannot seem to live with him, he cannot seem to live without him; the smell of the other sticks to each, masked by bathing, by cologne, by sweat but still it dominates the air. Will cannot find words for the resentment that festers, fetid and hungry in the pit of his stomach at everything Hannibal has put him through out of his painfully insatiable curiosity, but still he cannot keep himself from the fact that Hannibal, in dissecting him, looked upon each of his fragments with that destructive curiosity, fragments of his looking-glass that were not his own. Stolen bits from ravens he had added to his flock. They make up bits of him, and he sees himself through them, and when others looked away from this patchwork reflection Hannibal was ever more enthralled by him, and Will too was encouraged to look.

He watches Hannibal doze, the big cat in the sun, and tries not to think. He tries not to sleep.


	4. Charon

They must move. Quickly. Hannibal, thought brought low by injury, knows well that soon, very soon, the FBI will be within range of their hiding place. Their hideaway, their harbor in a little corner of the world will soon be in jeopardy and they cannot risk being caught, not this early. This is the metaphorical tail they will ditch so as to escape the bird circling above them. They may find it, but they will not know much more than that.

Hannibal mulls over each safe house and the distances between, the days it will take them to arrive, how long they may have to lie low.

He has resources aplenty, but backup plans, bank accounts, false identities will be rendered useless if they cannot avoid the watchful eyes of the FBI. Jack will want to bring them in personally. He will want that small triumph, that victory, that ability to stare at a CCTV monitor, maybe even through glass at Hannibal and ensure personally that he will remain there. That he will rot there, that his bones may turn to dust in that room, on that floor.

But Hannibal is curious about how he might deal with Will. Perhaps Jack will blame Hannibal for everything Will has done, and Jack is not wrong. Hannibal has long since come to the conclusion that attempting to reverse-engineer this man made of mirror-glass would never have worked, that he may have done more harm in his attempts to show Will what he saw in his puzzle-mirror mind than good.

His reflection was beautiful, and Hannibal, if anything, regrets he was unable to find a better way to convey to Will what he wanted to show him, but he did not yet know what he wanted.

Hannibal watches Will slice vegetables, precise and absorbed in his work, and wonders if he knows what he wants now.

It fluctuates from time to time. The broth on the tiny stove simmers, the pot shines in the dim ceiling light and Hannibal allows himself to stare out at the sea, at the quiet, the boat. At the moon rising above it all. He wonders what Will would look like set against it as a backdrop. He sketches an image in his mind from some warped low angle, staring upwards into Will’s silhouette, bloodied and gulping air and somehow a newborn babe, not yet washed and weighed and swaddled by careful hands, nor will he ever be. He is beautiful. Radiant as light spills from behind him. Hannibal cannot see him, but he can reconstruct him, restore him with utmost care and intense precision. 

“Hannibal?”

Will brings him back from his seascape escape, brows knitted in mild concern. Hannibal takes a moment to observe Will as he is. Knife in one hand, debris from vegetables not and scraped into the simmering pot next to him, cutting board littered with identical ingredients in the other. His face is healing well but he’ll have a scar and a sliver of beard missing to show for everything he has been through.

That side of his face is concealed at present though, by angle and by shadow from the dingy light hanging from the ceiling in the tiny kitchen. He’s donned a wrinkled white dress shirt  for today, rolled up at the sleeves, and as he drinks Will in for mere moments, Hannibal takes not of how his pinky finger rubs against his ring finger incessantly, unconsciously. Hannibal finds himself facing a brick wall in his assumptions, unable to face the inevitable discussion. He sighs, focusing his attention on the simmering pot. 

“Take a head of garlic from the bunch, you will only need a few of the cloves.”

Will turns away, once again consumed by his work. 

“You can alway add more, but you can’t remove the excess?”

“Exactly.”

———————

The broth tastes wonderful. It reminds Hannibal of his appetite, and he again longs for a time in a handful of months when he will be able to cook again. He wants to teach Will how to cook art, to listen to the sonnets of simmering pots, the whispers of slicing, crushing, chopping knives and dried, crumbled herbs in the art gallery of a kitchen.

It seems Will is more advanced than he thinks. Their time apart has changed them.

Hannibal can pinpoint each flavor, how they compliment each other, how simplicity breeds adaptability. He can taste calloused hands, more experienced with machinery than a knife, better with fish hooks, feather lures. He can taste the honing in on a happy medium, the bridge between their skills.

Bronzes and sunbeams and running, running water. Nature is neutral here. Gold highlights in coils, loose Botticelli curls, blazing warm tones that kiss each cheek balances out with dappled shade and muted green. All this poured into a bowl. Hannibal enjoys this peace, this little slice of the Will Graham Will has become while they have been apart. He hopes one day he may know him better. He hopes one day to know himself better.

They eat in silence.

———————

The sun is at the point between dawn and morning, just rising, just far enough above the horizon to be feasibly confused with twilight. Will ferries duffle bags between the cabin and the boat. Hannibal sits at the tiny kitchen table, waiting. He can’t do much to help, so he goes over the directions again, the navigation, their route to the next safe house. Reading through pages of notes in Will’s messy, loose scrawl.

He recalls their conversations of the night before, under the dim light of the kitchen, over a map, a compass, and a few sheets of paper. The door creaks open and Will, bundled in a jacket slightly too large for him steps inside, making his way over to scoop up their map and notes and Hannibal himself before departure.

Hannibal looks across the living room, however tiny, and marvels at what once was chaos and how it now looks so bare. Any medical supplies they have are packed onto their tiny boat as well, along with as many blankets as they can find in this cabin. Some of those used to be left out simply because there was no other way to store them. A box of gloves, medical tape, other anomalies in an otherwise idyllic scene.

They were markers of the times spent in silence of muscle memory built, of muscles healed and skin closing up. Blood vanishes. But they are far from healing.

Hannibal rights himself with caution, neatly folding the map and stacking the paper and compass on top, shuffling around the table and already bundled into an overcoat. As they make their cautious way out the door and down the steps of the cabin, Hannibal stumbles, feeling an arm slide around his waist. Taking his cue, he rights himself, putting an arm around Will’s shoulders and leaning for support. They move as one, wincing, and the boat is not so far away.

Will stacks a few towels along the corner of the conjoined seats, laying Hannibal down and forcing him to rest. He seems irritated at his own inability. Will engrosses himself again in the notes he took the night previous, studying their path on the map. Not the longest journey he’s taken by far, but not the shortest either. He could use the boat’s GPS; the navigation systems are in fine working order, but he trusts himself more than the computer.

He has experience. And he should leave. He should pull out of this decrepit dock right now, make the most of his time before night falls, and though their journey isn’t nearly that long, time warps when traveling. Hell, he could leave Hannibal if the idea possessed him with the needed urgency and vigor. But it can’t. So why does he stall?

Will finds his pinky finger compulsively rubbing his ring finger, picking at a spot where a ring used to be. He grimaces.

Doubt whispers in his right ear and resentment mutters in his left and he can’t listen to himself right now because he has no idea who is right. A life with Hannibal Will mean freedom, free from the yolk of his obligation. From anything he was asked to be, to do, what he would be asked to do. From Jack’s prying, calculating looks, from the manipulation, from an arena in which he has no choice in the game he played or the beast he slayed, only knowing that he had to.

And yet a life with Hannibal leaves everything up in the air, leaves him with the knowledge that he is choosing to ally himself with the man choosing the beasts he battled.  Out of sheer curiosity, out of a fascination, a fixation, an odd kind of love.

Will knows not what makes him move, what unnamed force drives him to his feet, what tells him to start the boat’s engine and feel the motor rumble into life, feel it and relish it. He doesn’t quite relish it, Will decides, it is somewhere between that and desperation. Like many mixed emotions it has not yet been named, but Will knows it as the feeling preceding the heart-in-throat sensation of freedom, of the drive of the legs to run and the lips to curve upwards in a smile.

He does not smile, but inwardly enjoys some quite triumph, a small victory he cannot identify. Still, it is there. It’s in the sun rising higher and higher over the the clouds, over their heads casting them in shade, it’s in the ocean spray and the air that tears at his cheeks, in the rumble under his feet and below that in the ocean frothing beneath. Will feels it in the absorption of plotting his course, of the roads he sees near coastline, of the coastal towns.

Just far enough away to pass by.

Will wonders about the state of those towns in a handful of weeks. Will they still be the same? Serial killers, murderers are so much less common—not because it’s gotten easier to catch them (Will can attest to that) but because it’s harder to keep in the dark. Someone will find you. Or you find someone, in Hannibal’s case.

Will looks back at him.  Somehow, he sleeps, perhaps having adjusted to the noise.

  
Will wonders if their faces will cover the town in the next few weeks, if it will light up each television screen and very suddenly children no longer walk freely in groups, but in packs if they must go anywhere. Will there be fewer people on the beaches?

How long until the media coverage tapers out, people having lost interest in the same story with no new information, nothing to grab them by the ears and eyes?

How long until the nightmare will subside from their minds?

How long until they grow restless and uncaring?

What if they hear nothing if it at all?

Will Hannibal and Will simply be ghosts, not dead, undead, floating in the wind like lost words fearfully spoken, summoned by their names that so few know? A handful of people may hear a snippet of it, a passing mention on the radio, those who read Freddie Lounds’ blog might now, but the majority of the population uninvolved with government work will be happily oblivious to the fact that Hannibal Lecter and Will Graham have, for now, evaded the FBI’s prying eyes, and perhaps those of the governments of a handful of European countries as well.

Spotlights shine from every direction, but despite their size there are only a few. Now, the only spotlight is the sun, surrounded by the colors of sunset bleeding into one another, and the boat’s engine stops for the day. Will looks at their tank. They should be okay for the rest of their journey; they filled up recently at a tiny, near-abandoned gas station.

But they’re not there yet. Hannibal is sitting upright, watching the sunset through bleary eyes. His hair falls into his face and Will considers how unlike him it looks. Perhaps he looks the same, face marred by a choice he made. He sits back with an exhausted sigh. Not nearly as difficult as crossing the Atlantic by boat, but not as easy when anyone could know your face, your name, and the fugitive you’re traveling with.

Not so easy when anyone could be watching, listening, when even if you pay in cash your face will mark where you’ve traveled. They haven’t run into any trouble yet. Will stares blankly at the underside of the boat’s roof, refusing to think for a moment. The air is getting heavier the farther south they travel, the earth defusing into the ocean. It’s calming, almost akin to a sedative. Petrichor with mild notes of the sea.

They’ve stopped for the night near an unoccupied, rocky beach with a marsh just inland , far from any populated area. There is perfect quiet here. Not silence, but a lack of permanent intrusion.

Will feels exhaustion settle into his bones, feeling the cool and rot and decomposition of the environment around him seep into his organs. Long grass and ivy grow in his lungs and around his bones, cracking them open leeching the bone marrow from them. He feels his blood draining from him, replaced by brackish water, bacteria blood cells and water plants sprouting from recent scars and injuries.

Will sighs, and pollen dusts his lips golden. His nerves are a system of mushroom roots interwoven into his spine, leading up to a terrarium of mushroom cultures in his brain. Everything has a voice. His digestive system bubbles in a baritone grumble, his heart adding the hollowness of a pan pipe to the hum while his bones clatter like wind chimes. He drips, melting, flowing, seeping into the boat, through it, below it. He takes root in the water below. 

Will sleeps just long enough to breath the boarder between solitude and isolation.


	5. The Starry Night

They will only sleep on this boat for a handful of nights, if that, but regardless Will worries over Hannibal’s condition. The environment is far from ideal (their cabin was far from ideal, this even more so) as a space for an injured man to recover. There is so little space for them to sleep.

Will knows full well that with the moon come thoughts unbidden and burdensome. He doubts he will sleep. No nightmares, only introspection and doubt. It creeps, quiet and unassuming into his thoughts, winding around his ankles as he sits idly at the stern. They extend upwards, underneath, around, towards him like he is somehow brighter, better than the warmest sunlight.

They reach up his legs, around his hips, his stomach, his wrists, and they immobilize him, these doubts. They coil around his shoulders and chest and press, they weigh him down. They punch holes in his hull and they force him to sink. The moon is blotted out as they drag him beneath the waves.

They’re quite gentle along this stretch of land, the currents. Will stands, unable to continues his contemplation of the water, sitting down again by the boat’s controls. He finds himself staring blankly at the backside of Hannibal’s head instead, which does not help matters. He sighs. Traveling by boat is peaceful, yes, but lonely. Especially when—well, there is no good way to describe Will’s situation.

He is poised between relishing a freedom and a strange acceptance of who he has come to be and the knowledge that he was made this way by the man who he has been freed by, freed with.

He summoned the demons Will had to fight, has to fight. He is one.

He wonders, looking at the back of Hannibal’s head, if the man really regrets anything they’ve done. If he wishes he would have made a different choice somewhere along the line, done something different to reach this hazy goal of his Will can fathom, but hasn’t quite come into focus.

His words on that fragile, crumbling cliff face speak volumes, and Will wonders if they are they confessions of a dying man, the last words, a safeguard perhaps? Maybe Will had seen something no one would ever see again, no one had seen except in glimpses of his childhood, and those people were long gone.

Will recalls a few flashes of it while he was playing fisherman to Hannibal’s fish(Orca, perhaps?).  A legitimate smile, an open one, a glitter of teeth behind lips unused to being drawn back. And then everything would fall back into place. The quiet giddiness would leave him and his shoulders would again relax and even out, become perfectly poised again. He would revert to the quietly observant face that seemed to be his default, always analyzing, constantly thinking, never a moment to rest.

He saw it for a handful of seconds, sitting exhausted and bloodied by the  Primavera. He thought it would the be most he’d see it for, the longest look he’d ever get into the layers upon layer of a person kept so closely under wraps. But then Hannibal had thrown the doors wide open on the edge of that rock face, and perhaps out of desperation, maybe a slip of the tongue, opened up for a handful of seconds, a precious few.

The blood was his blood, the flesh his flesh, truly, wholly his, not separated by some fine film of a personality, a genuine one, but a shield nonetheless. Will wants to see it again, look at it properly this time. But it will not be so easy.

As Will continues to stare blankly and the back of Hannibal’s head, he finds himself likening this curious task to coaxing a stray out of the darkness and into the soft pool of light surrounding his car. They never trust you at first, only approaching at the scent of food, an incentive, and then leaving once they have what they came for.

But the more you wheedle, the more you bait and pry and coax, you eventually win their favor. It reminds him of Winston. He was a particularly stubborn one. Smart. Cautious, not unlike Will knew Hannibal to be. He would be on his guard, now more than ever after their betrayal a handful of years ago.

He does not trust so easily. He does not open his gates freely, at least not the innermost gates—not those of stone and wood and shields borne by metaphorical armies but those of bone and muscle and heart. He will most happily snare those so willing to accept the bait into the increasingly numerous and fortified walls of stone he has placed surrounding his kingdom, and here he will test them.

Do they pry and the innermost walls, or are they content where they are? Do they respect his citizens, are they courteous houseguests and do they only take what is offered freely and accept with thanks what they request? If not, if they pry, if they are brash and rude he will lock down the walls they are imprisoned between. He will starve them out, watch not without care, but with a certain mercy.

_ Better you die here and be given new use, new life, than fall on the sword of some ruthless brute of a king. _

Will wonders how he has traversed so far. Only a day or so before, while sitting idly on the floor of that tiny living room and listening to a fragment of the childhood of a man so guarded had he noticed how far he had come. Will has seen, if only in glimpses, who Hannibal is, who he becomes when he trusts. He has only seen through the sliding peep hole in the great fortified doors, but he has caught enough to spark a curiosity that bodes ill for the cat.

Daring to enter these halls is a sentence, a commitment to either death or life. And for the pair of them, death is not an option. But Will has not yet gained passage into the heart of this kingdom and fortress combined. He does not yet know if he wants to.

Hannibal, like Will himself, is a double edged sword, and each is especially vulnerable to the other. Will risks breaking himself in entering such a pact. He has been shattered once. But his guard was not up then, he was still outside the internal walls. He had not come as far. It had worked, and backfired. Will was wounded in that attempt, but he was driven closer to the kingdoms heart, and now he knows not where he is.

In limbo perhaps?

Will wonders if he thinks too much. He does, he decides, his experiences on the cliff will tell him as much as proof of what happens when he doesn’t. Will sighs. Perhaps he should take another leap. Just to see what happens. An irrefutable fact, whether good or bad, a world with Hannibal—Hannibal’s world—is most interesting.

Besides, Will reasons, if only to force himself from his chair, the sky is remarkably clear out here. They are far removed from the bustling of cites and light pollution, even more so from the trees that surround the view of the firmament in Wolf Trap. Nothing here obstructs the open sky. Will reaches for the controls and turns off the last dim lights on their boat. Stepping as quietly as he can, Will ducks out from under the canopy and pads towards the bow where Hannibal sits, propped up and watching the stars with glassy eyes and a tender fondness.

Will takes the seat opposite.

He leans back and looks up at the sky. The vastness of it, the sheer broadness of its curve, its dome across the heavens is staggering. For a moment, Will is overwhelmed by the sheer all-encompassing nature of it. He has seen the sky in the darkness and far from any disturbances, yes, but this is different. There is truly quiet here, nothing to obstruct his view of space, not even trees.

No birds blot out a star for a moment or two, everything is quiet and calm. As he adjusts to his surroundings, Will spots the Big Dipper and its tinier counterpart. From there, he can see the Ursas, he can see Orion’s Belt and the hunter himself, arrow perpetually knocked and bow drawn, prepared to fire once he finds his mark.

He sees the Hydra, Cassiopeia, Perseus. Will can see each dotted map and star he knows, spread like a tablecloth over the dome of the sky. He never stopped to look when he traveled to Europe, never bothered. He was on a hunt and would not tire, would not stop to rest for the sky. Sure, he used the sky for navigation as well as the instruments he had, but Will never bothered to consider how vast it was, how fragile everything appeared to be in the night.

Will closes his eyes, and they almost ache with the detail and vivid nature of the night. He looks at Hannibal.

In fresh bandages, the painkillers settling in, and at peace, he is unbothered. He looks unbothered Will wonders how much he knows of the sky. Though his stare is glassy, he is clearly very focused, very far away. Up in the heavens somewhere, among gasses and atmosphere, and soon among the stars, on a leisurely hike through the vacuum of space.

Does he greet the Ursas as old friends, smiling at the roars in greeting of the she-bears? Does he wave cordially to Perseus and Gemini, and does he bow out of respect for Cassiopeia? Do Heracles and Orion jovially greet him, and does he accept their greetings with his piercing, cool smile? Does he watch the Hydra from afar, fascinated by the fantastical beast?

Hannibal recalls watching the stars from a window, a very long time ago. Before Will. Perhaps that is now how he measures his life. Before Will and after him, before this hurricane of a man came whirling violently over the horizon despite how he kept his head down, how quiet he was, how jumpy and irritable.

And every time another storm like this appeared before him he would stop it in its tracks, reroute the torrents of wind and reshape the clouds. Pull lightning from the sky and bend it, hush thunder, stopper snowfall.

But then Will came, and he was such a curious amalgamation of these. He was a beautiful, churning stack of clouds, pent-up storms and Hannibal knew he’d never seen anything remotely close to the man now reclining next to him, staring unseeingly at the sky. And then Hannibal wanted to see the hurricane’s eye, sit right in the center and look up out at the calm sky above, clear and clean and bright.

He wanted to sit in the epicenter and feel the chaos churn.

Find what made it so. Disrupt the eye wall.

Just out of curiosity.

And here he is, years later, wondering now if it was wiser to watch from afar. Doubt is, if he dares to be so profane, a bitch. Perhaps Will is rubbing off on him.

“You saved the wine.”

Hannibal blinks the haze from his eyes and turns his head just so, enough to catch Will in his peripheral. He knows where this will go. There is a certain silence when words are not spoken, when a conversation is not had and the inevitable is being delayed until absolutely, irrefutably necessary. When people prefer to note that a problem exists, but never touch on it, never look the other the eye after silently acknowledging its presence.

Conflicts like those weight down the air, hunt and corner any silence it finds, consuming it without a sound. Will is letting a bit of air out of the proverbial balloon in bringing it up. So it is.

“Savored it. It was a gift, no?”

Will’s gaze is still directed upwards, but his head shifts a fraction towards Hannibal.

“You hoped.”

“I did.”

“You hoped I would see.”

“Yes.”

Hannibal feels a knot rise in his throat and _damn_ this terrifying man for doing this to him, what has Will done to him, what has he done to deserve this?  


“What did you see?”

Hannibal’s efforts to swallow the lump in his throat are in vain, and instead, he stares, glassy-eyed again at the stars, and thinks of the nights Will must have spend mapping out the sky. Of course he would have had plenty of up-to-date navigational tools at his disposal when he crossed the ocean to find him all those years ago. (How many had it been? Hannibal knows, he hasn’t lost track of time, but how  long ? That seems more fitting.)

What stars would he have memorized, searched for once he returned to Wolf Trap again? Would he have known their constellations, the stories in their scattered patterns, would he have known their names? Not just of the figures but the stars that made them up? Were they looking at the same sky?

Will’s would have been perfect, perhaps muddled by clouds on the occasional night but otherwise clear and calm, a balancing weight to the eeriness of the ocean alone. Hannibal remembers the sky overlooking Florence, the golden ambient glow of the city beneath giving the impression of being lit from below by candlelight.

The sky shines just as bright at night when the street lamps dim and any light streaming from the windows of nearby buildings is shut off, leaving only the moon, stars, and street lamps far below. If Hannibal had the time, he might have sketched or painted it, an ode to _The Starry Night_ perhaps?

Warping the city below him, crystallizing they sky before him on his balcony in broad brushstrokes. The sun in the day was beautiful, the cobbled streets and art exhibits and oh, wouldn’t it be nice to see them when the sun shone? Hannibal decides that at some point Will must see them. The knot in his throat is dissipating now, slowly, and he can wait no longer to speak.

But he can’t quite say it, so he gestures upwards, reaching for the North Star, a brighter spot amongst its fellows.

Hannibal scoots upwards in his seat and Will turns to look at him, really looks at him, and swings his legs down from the gunwale. For someone not fond of eye contact, Will has looked at him many, many times. Looked into him. That was years ago now. The details make time feel longer, stretched thin.

How long had it been? Not in years, if so how do they measure it? In cases, in therapy sessions?

In moments where Hannibal could look back and know that Will was somewhat aware of the stitching in his person suit, would become aware, would attempt to see through the seams?

Those were the times when the air between them was thin, displaced by their close proximity, maybe to close to keep everything under wraps.  The stitching, so perfectly tailored, begins to strain.

And it does again, Hannibal can feel the stretch in the seams as Will leans in, and damn him in all of his comprehension, his understanding and his beauty. He’s not encroaching far, just enough to be noticeable, and Hannibal looks at him and he fears for once that a stitch may have come loose.

Will’s gaze shifts across him, through him, and follows through, standing up and rolls his shoulders, grimacing. He offers Hannibal a hand.


End file.
